


Ampersand

by mustinvestigate



Series: Nora Freis [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Masturbation, Oral Sex, POV First Person, Vaginal Sex, bad medicine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 07:24:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5776768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustinvestigate/pseuds/mustinvestigate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oh how the ghost of you clings: a not particularly eventful 240th birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ampersand

I was supposed to spend my 30th birthday in Fallon's department store's top-floor restaurant. Nate had promised this over kebabs and Gwinnie lagers on the night of my 19th, back when white wine, soggy cucumber sandwiches and a checked cloth on a table overlooking the downtown skyline seemed impossibly adult to two penniless students. He rolled the small diamond ring around my finger and teased that we'd be an old married couple then, so impossibly far away in the future; he'd be bald and I'd be fat and we'd complain about our COs and the kids and the cracks in our base-issue housing and the night would end before they could serve the cake, when I threw a drink in his face for flirting with the waitress.

Instead, two hundred and ten birthdays slipped past without a blown candle, and I'm dawdling away my 240th on watch duty, craving grilled lamb and cold fizzy beer and hoping something, anything, will be foolish enough to attack Sanctuary and distract me from the fourth repetition of good old _Butcher Pete_ in as many hours.

I'm still wearing my pretty pink dress, damn it all, the one I thought would never again zip up around my waist no matter how many laps I jogged around the neighbourhood. My combat boots, lined leather duster, and frag grenades rather fetchingly complete the ensemble.

The new bird's nest roof is high enough to let me stand, stretch, carefully rotate my bad shoulder. It’s finally healed enough that I can take Sparky's recoil without collapsing in shameful gasps. I haven't adjusted yet to how much life hurts, now, how much more pain everyone around me can take without crying for their mommy, or at least an economy-size pack of Super Duper Codeine.

Like Mac with his _teeth just hurt_ philosophy and its ancillary _that's what whiskey's for_ codex. And the bemusement in his face giving way to anxiety as he listened to me describe what I could remember of root canals and wisdom teeth surgery to Doc Weathers while that snake oil magus greedily flipped though the hoarded textbooks and medical journals I'd let him read in return for Mac's treatment (or suffering as the doc's first guinea pig, depending on how you looked at it, and I like the version where I'm the clever one).

_This'll open up a whole new revenue stream for me!_ he'd crowed, while Mac muttered darkly, _You're either the best girl a man's ever had, or the worst_ , but he'd agreed, complaining afterward that I just couldn't stand to be seen with some ugly toothless guy on my arm.

He couldn't entirely hide the pleased curve to his lips, though, even through a solid day of throbbing pain in his face while the stims slowly healed up the doc's work. It's the same look he gets when I insist on shaving him ( _"Nor, I know my own face." "Yeah, but I'm the one who's got to look at what you leave crooked."_ ) He likes the fuss, likes wearing a woman's touch, absently stroking the now-tidy beard or clenching his jaw and hmming at the pain that doesn't stab through his face.

I was supposed to dread this day, wonder if the old lady I'll be had snuck much closer while I wasn't looking, curse the last ten pounds of baby weight that wouldn't shift, maybe even be pregnant with our second and shamefully sipping the single glass of wine I'd not pass up on my birthday. The greatest peril Shaun would face would be his grandparents, stuffing him with sweets and keeping him up half the night watching old war holos until he was sick and square-eyed. Nate and I probably would argue like he'd teased, about the mortgage and our near-empty savings account, whether civilian life had really worked out as we'd hoped.

It sounds like a beautiful dream.

The old pink dress slides around me now as I bend and stretch, working a cramp out of my back. At least travelling the wastes, dragging a hundred pounds of sellable crap stripped from the bodies of my victims, took care of that baby weight. It and every extra calorie I ever sighed over, standing on the bathroom scale. My new life as a post-apocalyptic serial killer has that much going for it, at least.

And Mac. It's got him now, too, wherever he is right this second, out doing my job while I rest a busted shoulder and extremities still a little tingly-numb from radscorpion venom. Just regular old scorps, too, not the giant extra-mutated ones out in the glow, the god-knows-how-many miles I'll have to cross and re-cross searching for an Institute defector who doesn't want to be found. Along with reavers and deathclaws and, oh yes, the perpetual radiation shower from the roiling sky above...I'm a madwoman to think I'll last even an hour.

Yesterday, I killed a fusion core walking slowly up and down Sanctuary's main street, timing how long I could drag myself uphill with it powered down, chased by dirty children who knocked on my knees and shouted _hellooooo in there_. The results compared surprisingly well with the data I'd recorded on my pip-boy during the Med-Tek hit, when less than an hour had drained a third of the core's juice. If I keep to a crawl and avoid battle, even punch out the fuel for downhill stretches, a core might last me eight hours, maybe even more. Given the search pattern I've roughed out, that means I'll need fewer cores than anticipated, maybe just ten more. I could be searching the glow in a couple of weeks.

Yay.

No. No, that's a good thing. Genuinely. With Mac at my back, I've been able to swing obscene profits as a freelance murderer while still showing Maxson and Preston enough progress to keep them on their sides of the line I've toed in the radioactive dust. I wish he was here to chew over survival strategies with me, see if I have any ideas that don’t make him roll his eyes and call me an idiot.

Actually, I just wish he was here. Even if half the survivors out in the wastes don't know or care how old they are, let alone bake a pretty little cake to celebrate the day their odometer rolls over, it'd be nice to at least split a beer with my guy, maybe even get laid. Assuming we're on good enough terms for that.

Nah, everything's fine. Probably. Just a bumpy patch courtesy of good old Dr Matulewicz's "asymmetrical expectations". One little fight, nothing to panic over.

“We should be more careful, now,” I told him, getting dressed and armoured for the road, right after we'd been anything but. “The contraceptive shot will be wearing off soon, and we don’t want to get caught out.”

And his response? "Why don't we just see what happens?"

He backed off it quickly enough, probably because I had a face like an army of behemoths just stomped up the front walk and demanded I lay out high tea. "Nah, forget I said it. You've got all that radiation down south to wade through pretty soon, and hey, it won't be long after that until we've got two boys trying to knock down every wall in Sanctuary. We'll have our hands full."

Speaking of careful, I should've been. He always talks like it's a given that Duncan's fine now, recovering with his friends, who will deliver the little guy to his doorstep any day now.

(How? They’ve got ways of finding people. He's been one of their ways of finding people. He's not worried.)

But it was only a couple days before that we slid into an abandoned basement nursery, scavving the old Trinity Church, and he looked at the crib like his heart would break. _Just something in my eye_. Yeah. And I'm totally fine with sleeping in our old house a stone's throw away from Nate's perfectly preserved murder scene, close enough I'd swear I can hear the refrigerators running on quiet nights.

But he'd reminded me of the glow, and my heart kicked up like Krupa on ultra-buffout, _I'm going to fail, I'll never make it through, Shaun will live and die his whole life trapped in the Institute_ , and the harshness in my snapped-off _You can't count on that_ was only aimed at me but slammed through both targets like an arrow in that old Robin Hood holo Nate liked to watch late at night on furlough, when his body was still on Anchorage time.

So I tried to loop it around quick, but my foot was jammed in there tight, blocked up the gentle _I just can't make plans that far ahead right now, even ones I'd really like to happen_ and let through the not-as-funny-as-it-sounded-in-my-head _Back in my day, a fellow who's that committed after a couple months probably had a basement dungeon full of ex-girlfriends_.

And we were off, a pair of belly-stabbed deathclaws fencing with untipped épées like the bedroom held a judging panel scoring us on technique and raw spite, but after I told him I didn't want to rush things and he spat out that putting them off sure worked out well for me before, he was the one to hold up a hand and call for a truce. A remnant of old Doc Matulewicz's marriage counselling, again, an agreement to put the brakes on a fight when it's just competing to make the other guy bleed a few more drops than you, picking it up later when you're calm enough to resolve a single issue.

There's probably a level of irony that this works better now than it did with Nate, carefully talking out a sore point in between rounds of mass murder and monster extermination instead of on the drive home from the Super Duper Mart. Maybe there's a perspective following so much fear and death and corpse-robbing that even the Saturday-afternoon scrum for half-priced bagels couldn't match.

Still, truce or not, it was a quiet walk to the first item on my week's agenda, courtesy of Preston (clearing out the old ski resort north of Sanctuary for a new settlement space)…even before Mac shot me in the back.

It wasn't his fault. I took a shot at a radscorpion maybe twenty paces away and it dove underground, boiled back up with three of its friends under my feet. Two of them stung before I had Little Shooty in hand, punches in my chest like .50 mm rounds, and the other two got me just as I emptied a clip into one ugly little face. Bullets flew past my shoulder, pulverising one stinger as it went in for a second dose, and the situation was in hand seconds after it had arisen, aside from the mad ticking of my pip-boy's geiger counter, until I danced out of range of another stinger while I reloaded, right into the bullet that should have splattered it.

And then I had a mouthful of dirt and the surprisingly calm thought that my arm was clean off, that I should probably stand up and look for it, as half a dozen shots whistled over my head and a giant, heavy body dropped limp over my legs, its massive claw brushing my ear with delicate intimacy. There was a roar in my ears like a subway train, under which I could just make out someone chanting _no no no no no_ like it was the last evening express pulling away, and I don't remember saying anything but _ow_ when he rolled me over. Apparently, I told him this would be an excellent chance to try out Neriah’s experimental serum, to make sure he set the pip-boy to record the results. 

Which he did. Good man.

I don't recall him packing bandages into the hole in my back where bullet met shoulder blade and shattered together or dragging me to Sanctuary's medic, aside from a vague memory of apologising for throwing up on his boots and him shrugging, _they've seen worse_. The actual treatment is a merciful whoosh of med-x, broken up with flashes of confusion at why I was sleeping on Mrs Able's kitchen counter when she had coffee laid out on the table, listening to her hum as she rocked Shaun. _He's hungry_ , I told her, _give him here_ , but she hushed me, ordered me to sleep.

Codsworth told me when I came to that I'd called Sturges Nate as he'd held me down so the medic could put all the shattered bones in my shoulder to rights, asked him again and again to do his Silver Shroud impression for the girls, but nothing to feel embarrassed about, ma'am, and I wondered how much discretion was built into his programming. He told me as well, with more than a hint of disapproval, that "Sir" had only stayed until it was clear I'd recover before taking Cait and Strong back out, leaving only the message that they'd return in a week.

It's sweet, in the backwards way I tend to appreciate more than normal-people gestures. _Sorry I almost killed you; I'll go pick up the work you can't do so we'll stay on schedule, and by the way, maybe notice how I'm not dramatically refusing to leave your bedside like some kinda clingy boyfriend?_

After all, I had a robot for that.

So there was nothing but Codsworth-enforced rest and recovery, the bot solicitously holding books and journals for me when my half-dead fingers couldn't turn the pages, chasing away committee chairs at buzzsaw point when he decided _that's enough company, ladies, Ma'am must have her rest now._

I was left with the uncomfortable luxury of empty time, and whether it was the med-x still flushing out of my system or the yanked-out wiring in the part of my brain I don't look at too closely, I drifted through more than a few hours lost in memories of sun-soaked kitchens, almost hearing Mrs. Able's sympathetic-nostalgic-amused voice as I sobbed about my cracked, bleeding nipples, how prisoners of war were kept awake for days and days too, _The world will not end if your healthy little boy has a few bottles of formula and a night or two up with his daddy on the couch watching monster movies, while you get in some solid sleep._

Little did _she_ know.

A few days in, I caught myself trying to write grocery lists with still-clumsy hands, looking for my car keys, remembering clinic hours for Shaun's weekly weigh-in, once sleepily calling out _you home, babe?_ when a generator rumbling to life woke me from a fitful nap. Then, I pushed past Codsworth and chased down the committee chairs, buried myself in settler numbers and supply routes and security upgrades.

I'm not always here, I'd tell Mac, if it didn't scare me too much to admit these slips even to myself. _It won't happen again_ , I think instead. _That was the last time_.

There's movement to watch, _finally_ , a huge green head topping the rise between here and the Red Rocket, and happy as I'd be for a target in my sights, I'm happier to recognise Strong's grumpy features. His long strides carry him over the hill and halfway to the bridge before Cait and Mac appear, and I whistle the four-note code for _friendlies incoming_ down to the front gate guards.

All three are loaded down under heavy packs, extra guns bristling like porcupine quills, and it looks like I'm even closer to my fusion core goal than expected. I move Sparky in a slow arc, catching the low sun's light to flash them, smiling when Mac looks back at me through his scope. A relieved, kinda dopey grin splits his sharp features, and god damn, I did not expect to enjoy feeling like a dirty old woman quite this much.

Strong reaches me first, shrugging off the tarpaulin backpack Sturges made for him with an indignant "Stupid human trash!"

It's the better part of valour not to ask whether he means it or me, so I lean over the railing and call down, "Your report, Strong?"

He gives me the usual wide grimace I've chosen to interpret as quiet respect. "Strong kill many raider, many squishy man, many super mutant, not kill steel man. Strong eat well and sleep now. Cait and Mack Ree Dee also there."

"Good job, big guy." He shows me more of his ghastly teeth as Mac and Cait drop their packs and start up the bird's nest ladder.

"Hey there, beautiful," Mac murmurs, stealing a kiss when I lean over to pull him up.

"Hey yourself." I'm pretty sure there's a matching asinine smile on my face at the sight of him, and yeah, everything's fine. I throw his commitment back in his face, he almost kills me, we're even.

"Oh and I'm sure I'll get such a welcome, too, after killing just as many bastards as him and hauling twice the load back?"

"Hey beautiful," I greet Cait at the top of the ladder and plant a kiss on her lips. Her fair cheeks flush crimson under the chapped windburn.

"Strong wants no kiss," the super announces to the camp. The gate guards lean back to peek around the wall, either hoping or dreading they'll catch their fearless leader sexually harassing a mutant.

"Let me know if you change your mind," I call down, for their benefit, but he's already stomping off toward his house, dragging a half-eaten leg I truly hope came from a particularly bad raider.

"And what gave you the idea you could take liberties, Handsy McGee?" But her scowl is a pleased one, and more importantly, she doesn't punch my lights out.

"Hey, don't let me get in the way, unless you can point me toward a working camera I could fetch back real quick?" Mac teases, leaning on the back of my chair.

"Just give me that rifle, loverboy, and I'll keep watch on the road while you two act like you're the first in history to figure out what pokes in where."

"Here," I hand her Sparky, not needing to see Mac's hands tighten on his very favourite gun. "Play with this big boy instead."

"Ooooh," she croons, "C'mere, you darling, let Cait show you how you deserve to be treated."

"Target practice!" she shouts down to the guards, and after the warning's gone round the walls, she squeezes off a few rounds into the woods across the stream.

"You don't have to compensate for wind or recoil with laser weapons," Mac tells her. "Just put your sights on the target and shoot."

"I know that," she snaps back and tries again, hitting a couple of tree trunks this time. She rests the rifle against the railing and gives me a sly look. "Sure and he's Mr Professional now, but all week he's done nothing but stare at me arse. You're throwing yourself away on this dog, Nora, no two ways about it."

Mac's hand freezes on the back of my neck.

"Ah well, Cait," I say lightly, "Nothing for it then but to kick him out of bed and drag you back in his place."

"You should be so lucky," she retorts, the corners of her lips twitching upward for just a breath before she puts the scope back to her eye.

"Again, if there's a working camera…anywhere…" The stiffness in his fingers as he rubs my good shoulder belies his easygoing words. I lift my shoulder and tilt my head to catch his hand between them, rubbing my cheek against it. Anxiety and affection buried in aggressive innuendo is a language Cait and I both speak fluently, but he sounds a little rusty.

"How'd it go?"

Cait answers first. "We hit all the little marks on your map, and a few that weren't, left nothing breathing. Since we ended up near the airport, I tried my hand with the fellow in the vertiberd, and he took us right up to Danse to report - "

"Wait, wait…" I have to wave at her to cut off Cait's stream of words. "They let you up on the Prydwen? Without me?"

"We're on a list, it seems," Mac says. "Danse cleared it."

"We were stuck with a babysitter the entire time, though," Cait complained.

"…who Cait distracted at a few crucial moments…" Mac drawls, pulling two fusion cores out of his pocket and handing them to me with a proud smile. "We didn't tell Danse you were laid up, just 'unavoidably detained elsewhere'."

"The man nearly wept," Cait breaks in.

Mac hands me a much-folded piece of paper, coordinates written in small, neat handwriting. "New assignments from your Steel overlords. Also, you're apparently a knight now. Any initiates out in the field who don't salute you, we can shoot in the leg."

"I'm serious, I saw a tear in his eye. His tin can's probably rusted through by now." Cait rests Sparky on the ledge again. "But he gave us no trouble. I did have to set that Maxson boy straight on a few things, though."

"Maxson? Set him straight on what?" I asked, sitting up straight fast enough to dislodge Mac's hand.

"Never you mind. It's all put to bed now, nothing to worry about."

I start to worry. "Mac, what did she…"

Mac shrugs. "Don't ask me. I was in the vertiberd by then. I don't even know how she gave our keeper the slip long enough to get in Maxson's stateroom."

"Oh god…"

"I said don't worry," Cait snaps. "He knows what he did. Now can I trust you dirty lovebirds to keep your eyes on the road and hands out of each other's pants if I go put my feet up, as they're sore to the bone after this last week doing your drudgery?"

"Not at all," I reply weakly, wondering what in the hell she got into with Maxson and how much ground I'll have to give next time to smooth it over. Maybe I should just avoid the Prydwen entirely for a while…

"Well I'm leaving anyway, so it's on your head if we're all killed in our sleep," she declares, leaving Sparky by the ladder.

"She's probably heading for her psycho stash," Mac mutters, watching her climb down. "I didn't catch her using today, so she's probably hurting. She's not doing good, Nor."

Cait hasn't been doing good as long as I've known her. The first time I tried to talk to her about it, she blackened one of my eyes, and the second, she pushed me out a second-story window (fortunately with a semi-intact awning underneath, so I barely cracked my tailbone when I landed). Since then I mostly try silently holding her when she's had too much or couldn't get any, keep an addictol ampule on hand, and hope she'll come around once it sinks in people here really do give a damn about her.

"I'll try talking to her again before we head out." On a ground floor and out of arm's reach, possibly. "She's got a lot she's running away from."

"She did well otherwise, though, her and Strong both - she took on KLEO and got us a good deal." He digs in another of the million pockets of his jacket and hands me two more fusion cores. "The rest went on beer and meds and psycho, though."

"Any more rad-away?"

"None. It's hard to find, lately."

"I've probably bought it all. At least Neriah’s serum worked as well as she promised."

He's quiet for a minute, now that the topic's raised. Not sure what to say myself, I pick up Sparky and give the woods a good look over.

"How's the shoulder?" he asks, finally, playing with the neckline of my dress like I might smack his hand away.

"Good as new," I lie, pushing my coat and dress down my arm so he can get a look at the healing scar. He crouches down and slides his fingers under the dress to touch the part he can't see, drops a quick kiss where my shoulder meets my neck. "I've still got some nerve damage in my hands and feet from the venom, but that should heal up on its own, or the next time I have to use a stimpack."

"Could be worse," he observes quietly, resting his forehead on the back of my neck.

"Yeah," I agree, thinking _it could have taken my head clean off_. "But it gave me the chance to get really stuck in here on the new bathhouse controversies."

He snorts, tickling the hairs on the back of my neck. "So are we running out of here as soon as your shift ends, or do I get a night in a real bed first?"

I twist in the chair and kiss him as long as I dare, with the sun nearly down - prime time for a raider attack. "What do you think?"

"I think I should probably wash off the mutie blood and guts," he breathes when I let him go and turn back to the bridge.

"Stay a while."

"I stink."

"It's manly."

"Just say you missed me."

"I missed you. Keep me company for a bit."

He sits on the boards next to the chair and props his rifle up so he can look through a break in the slats, but when I peek over, he's got his hat propped on his knee and is absently running his fingers through his sweat-matted hair until it stands on end, probably wishing for a cigarette. His eyes are closed but his face is soft under the lines of exhaustion, relaxing after a hard week. Completely in the moment. I envy that ability.

"So, it looks like I might only need six more cores," I tell him, breaking the quiet. "We could probably do that in a couple of weeks, especially if we head south."

"Huh," he says, stiffening next to me, his voice flat. "That soon?"

"Yeah, that soon," I reply softly. "You don't think I'm ready?"

"Of course," he replies quickly, too quickly. "But, uh, look - I was thinking, while I was out there…there might be another way to learn how to get into the Institute."

I bite my tongue before I can snap at him, _don't you think I've looked for any other way?_ , and he rushes to continue, lowering his voice to a whisper.

"You ever hear people talking about something called the Railroad?"

"Yeah," I say carefully, not pointing out that the only ones not laughing at the concept of synth-loving humans were completely off their rockers.

"I'm pretty sure they're out there." He looks over his shoulder, swallowing nervously, and it'd be comical if not for the genuine anxiety tightening his features. "You know that friend, the one Duncan's with?"

"The one you said you can't tell me anything about, sure." He's got me whispering now too. "And you don't have to."

"Not if it means you don't have to risk your life trying to find one jagoff in the middle of all that radiation, and worse." He shakes his head. "She's a Brotherhood defector. Was pretty well up in the ranks, too, probably could have taken over as Elder when both the Lyons died, if she'd wanted that. There's a price on her head now, but only if you can bring her in alive."

"Mac, I wouldn't use one of your people as a bargaining chip with Maxson, if that's what you're worried about."

"Yeah, I know that, but she…I made a deal to keep my mouth shut, and never to come back in case I couldn't do that. And…look, just listen, okay?"

I nod and settle in to scope out the horizon again while he talks, giving him some space to work around to the point.

"She turned on them when the Outcasts returned, when they started exterminating ordinary ghouls, threatening to wipe out any settlement that didn't exile theirs, when they went after the super mutants who stayed peaceful enough in their territories. She told me they had some kinda virus to spike their purified water with that would even kill humans with any mutations, a weapon she'd left with them for safekeeping after the Enclave developed it."

"The Enclave?"

"That's not important - they're all dead now. That was back in her hoo-rah days, when I didn't see her so much."

"…okay. So…she was surprised the Brotherhood couldn't resist the shiny new weapon she gave them, and defected."

"Yeah. She destroyed their virus supply, wiped as many of their research and intel banks as she could, and ran. Went underground, literally, turning old vaults into defensible settlements for anyone on Steel's reject list. She's almost been captured five or six times, so, yes, she's paranoid about the Brotherhood even knowing she's still alive, let alone still active."

"I'm not following you, Mac - you think I should get in touch with her?" I rub my knuckle along the faded Steel decal on Sparky's barrel. "The Brotherhood doesn't know any more about the Institute than I do today, so I can't see what she'd have learned back then that - "

"We couldn't reach her if we tried. I just think she's got Railroad connections," Mac whispers. "I told you, my clearance in her team wasn't high, and she'd sometimes break off after listing ghouls, muties, humans, and… Like there was another category. She kept a contact in Rivet City even though it was Steel, and sometimes we'd have regular people join us from there, ones who could live with almost as much radiation as the ghouls liked. Always people from the north."

"You didn't get a lot of ordinary people from Pennsylvania or New York who just wanted to join a safe settlement?"

He shakes his head. "They'd sign up under Steel's terms, if they just wanted safety. The only non-mutants she usually took in had ghouls they wouldn't live apart from or were in hiding."

I chew on the new ideas for a minute, watching movement on the far ridge that turns out to be a clumsy radstag. "So, if we find them, we try to trade on your connection with this defector? That's too dangerous - they'll want to confirm with her, and then she'll know you've broken the deal."

"We don't need her when we've got you," he snorts. "If we can find these Railroad people, you'll be running their whole show within a week."

"I wish that was a joke," I mutter. Even a spreadsheet jockey like me seems more strategically qualified than most of the would be do-gooders I've met out here.

"And you've got a friend here who makes a living tracking down people who don't want to be found."

"I've got to go to Diamond City anyway to get Nick…and we could scav and sell as usual on the way, in case it doesn't come to anything," I say slowly, thinking out loud.

My relief whistles up at me from the ground, and we both jump, sharing a startled, conspiratorial glance.

"You work out the details," he says, sliding down the ladder before the new guard can come up and take my place. "Strategy's your end."

I put the idea aside while updating the new guard, a sharp kid from somewhere out in the midwest with an anti-material rifle almost as tall as herself. It has the feel of a quandary I should sleep on - the risk of not pursuing my most likely lead and forcing my little boy to endure extra weeks as a lab rat vs the risk I'll die five steps into the glow and never get to Shaun at all - rather than consciously focus on and leave myself a gibbering wreck.

I know better than to plan anything more involved than raiding the communal cookpot when I cross Sanctuary. It takes at least a half-hour to get to the larder in the old culdesac, on the way soothing hurt feelings over who's got a real bed and who's still roughing it on an old mattress, approving a plan to add barbed wire to the outer walls, cooing over Ben's little girl with the hairlip (wondering if there's something in the old textbooks that Doc Weathers could be convinced to try out there), and a few other questions I answer on autopilot, making a break for my front door before our food's got icicles hanging from it.

Mac's waiting in the kitchen by the time I bring in our two bowls of what's probably radstag, beans, and tato stew, hair still damp under his hat, wearing the old jeans and flannel shirt he usually scruffs around Sanctuary in. He's liberated a half-empty bottle of whiskey from his stash in the high cupboard and poured two shots, toying with one, and already tastes like alcohol when I kiss him, settling into a chair close enough that our legs touch. He doesn't pour me another when I've finished my drink, though he leaves the bottle within reach if I change my mind, and we let the quiet settle in while we eat.

It's nice, having a shared dinner routine again, even if a meal's usually whatever we bolt down at a borrowed campfire in between murder sprees.

We've got the house to ourselves. My roommates who used to stay in the living room decided they'd rather move into their half-built shack after our first night back from a long settlement run, which I can't quite make myself feel bad about, and Codsworth's baleful hovering has kept anyone else from claiming the rooms while we're away.

It reminds me a little of my first nights in this place, counting the dollars left in our savings account after the entirety of my parents' wrongful death settlement went into the down payment, Codsworth still in his box since we couldn't yet afford the special fuel to jump-start his fusion system. It was the most scared I'd been in my life, and no one was even shooting at me.

Mac's fidgety, waiting for me to finish after he's devoured his own serving, pouring a final shot and capping the bottle. I wonder if he's nervy about the plan to hunt down this supposed railroad, if word might get back to his friend through them that he's talked, or…

"Let me see your back again," he asks.

Yeah, we never did finish that argument. Suppose I won by default when he came a few inches from killing me, even if it was accidental. _I can't make a commitment because chances are I won't be alive to honor any of it._ Cheerful thought.

I have to unbutton the dress most of the way down to slip it off my shoulders. He sets his hand flat against the scar and tells me to move my arm, frowning as he feels the bone shift while I stretch and rotate the joint, finally nodding with a relieved sigh.

"That'll heal up fine. Probably still hurts, though?"

"Yeah," I admit, torn between relieved and irritated that he's put the bottle away. I could really go for another shot or three right now. Instead, looking over my shoulder at him, I undo another button.

"Keep it on." There's a start of a smile cutting through the anxious set of his mouth, at least. "Y'know, that's the first thing I ever saw you in that wasn't a Grognak costume."

"Yeah, I remember." I dunk our bowls in the water bucket propped in the sink. Cleaning them gives me a minute to will the heat out of my cheeks, recalling my determination to work off some sexual tension with someone who wasn't the hired gun I depended on, who was turning into a good friend, who might respond to a pass mostly out of fear I'd fire him otherwise. I'm not sure what was my finer moment that night, Preston's pointed exit not just from his shelter near the gate but the entire damn settlement, or petulantly getting so roaring drunk afterward that I never could piece together what Cait and Strong and I got up to.

Tormented by no such memories, Mac wraps his arms around me from behind, resting his chin on my shoulder. "You were beautiful in it. Still are."

"Here I thought you preferred Grognak," I chuckle, feeling his half-growled _hmmm_ rumble against my back.

He could probably go his entire life happy enough with fully dressed missionary sex and the occasional blowjob. That seems pretty typical of life out here now, at least in my limited personal experience, combined with the vast observational data involuntarily gathered from sleeping in shared bunkhouses. Just getting him naked pushes him well outside his usual comfort zone, as much as he'll respond with such needy urgency just being touched everywhere usually covered up, how reluctant he'll be to give up all that skin contact by getting dressed afterward. About the only even slightly kinky desire he'll admit to is dressing me up in the old world clothes we sometimes find…especially the old Grognak costume.

"I liked Grognak just fine," he mutters a touch defensively, "but I was used to it. The dress, though…that gave me some ideas."

His voice nearly trails off at the end, as if I'll be offended he was attracted to me before we were actually together. As if I didn't have an impure thought or two just watching this guy no bigger than me face down two heavily armed soldiers in the Third Rail's back room.

"Anything fun?" I ask mischievously, turning and sliding my arms around his waist.

"Eh," he shrugs and laughs a little. "Nothing you didn't blow right past that first time. You, uh, you kinda surprised me."

I give him a little push, walking him backwards toward the bedroom.

"Surprised you how?" I ask, as if I don't already have a pretty good idea.

"I, uh…" He wheezes out a faint laugh when his legs bump into the bed and I nudge him back onto it. "I thought I'd have to work harder."

I steal his hat, plopping it on my own head for safekeeping, and straddle his hips, leaning over to unbutton his shirt. We've got a couple weeks of, at best, brief and mostly clothed fucking ahead of us, so I'm damn well getting him naked tonight. "I could play much harder to get, if you'd like that more."

"No, god no. This is better. Before, you just seemed kinda…hung up…on anything the human body did. I figured you'd be more…less like one of those old pinups come to life." He flinches a little as I unbuckle his belt and pull it out of the loops with a hard snap. "In a good way. A really good way. Just, surprising. It hadn't occurred to me before you'd have such…high expectations."

He toes off his boots so I can push his jeans the rest of the way down and kicks them off the end of the bed, shivering in the chilly room. His skin's warm, though, flushed pink from more than the whiskey.

Mac's beyond adorable when he blushes.

And beyond frustrating with his ill-timed honesty. 

"That's what you get, carrying on with wicked pre-war women." 

When I'm distracted - say, by a naked body spread out underneath me, begging to be thoroughly explored - it's easy to fall into the old marital autopilot, just-this-side-of-insulting teases and frank appreciation of what I'm lucky enough to be working with. Except Nate had an ego the size of Alaska and a sense of humor dug in far deeper than any mere emotion. He'd respond to a crack about an ex-girlfriend dungeon with _actually, it's a closet full of skulls; feel free to break in and tidy up, they get terribly dusty. So are we starting on Nathan Jr. this week or next?_ Mac's cocky, prickly exterior doesn't go nearly as deep, at least not with me. 

"We had much more spare time to devote to the corruption of fine, upstanding young men." 

That gets a real laugh out of him at least, and the stiff shoulders under my hands relax a little, enough so I don't feel like an utter creep kissing a line down to one of his finely shaped hands, feeling hard callouses on my tongue when I suck on two of his fingers. My hands follow a map of old scars down his chest and stomach, sliding around his back to find the long slash over one kidney that looks like he stitched it himself up one-handed and left it to heal au naturale. There's nothing extra on him, nothing wasted, even after months of regular meals. Just wiry muscle under cave-dweller pale skin, so much lighter than mine. 

He moves under my hands like a purring cat and pushes the hem of the dress higher up my thighs. I spread my legs a little further apart and grind down on the hard cock beneath me, already aching with impatience. The temptation to take over, to slide down over him too fast, the shivery shock of stretching to take him in all at once, and christ he curves perfectly that way, leaning back so his cock presses hard inside with his thumb rolling my clit outside, and the way he watches every shudder and gasp so intently…

But I give him a moment to breathe - metaphorically speaking, as he uses it to sit up and kiss my neck, holding me in his lap as he undoes all the buttons I just buttoned back up for him. I tighten my legs around his waist in anticipation as he slides a hand inside my bra, but his thumb runs gently across my nipple, not pinching it.

"I'm not complaining," he insists quietly.

"Neither am I."

His hat's lost somewhere over the side of the bed as he rolls us over and slithers down the bed to get between my thighs, but not before I catch the grin on his face. Damn, but he looks happy. It's a relief; fearing inadequacy is a hellish state, not easily shifted - those are memories I'm happy to leave buried in all that old world rubble - and he doesn't deserve it.

He hooks a finger in my underwear and yanks them out of the way, burying his tongue inside me. He's already got an arm thrown over my stomach, holding me down as I automatically try to grind into his mouth, making these needy rumbling noises against me, and not that you give _any_ lover a report card, especially not grading on a curve, but he's definitely the best at this. All tongue and lips and careful teeth, nothing held back, like he could happily drown in me, and too soon I have to squirm away.

"I want that gorgeous cock inside me when I come." It's stupidly primal, but I want to feel him come, too, even though it'd really be cutting it far too fine. "You know, we've probably got a little while left that it's ok…"

"Careful's fine." He pushes the skirt higher, ducking to kiss the pregnancy-scarred stomach that reveals, teasing the head of his cock just short of sliding inside me, then rubbing it in a slow circle around my clit. "Careful's good."

The air whuffs out of his chest as I tighten my legs around his ass, pulling him inside me in one hard stroke.

"Impatient," he whispers through a soundless chuckle.

I catch his hands and wrap his arms around my neck. "I just like having you close."

"I'm not going anywhere."

The bastard's determined to be a tease, thrusting slowly, barely brushing my clit with every stroke, but as worked up as I am, it's almost enough. I lie back, shivering at the scrape of his beard on my neck, trembling on the edge and trying to keep my groans quiet enough to wake only half the settlement.

"Play with your nipples for me," he whispers almost inaudibly, and I can't get a hand free to whip off my bra fast enough. A request that isn't _whatever you want_? Yes. Very yes.

His gaze locks on to my chest, his breath hitching as I barely hold back a _my eyes are up **here**_ crack he'd probably take seriously. Instead I let him enjoy the show, spreading my fingers over my breasts and pushing them together the way he likes to, caressing them gently until his control breaks and he's driving into me hard and fast.

Then I give in myself, angling my hips to get more stimulation where I need it, pinching my nipples hard. He's groaning my name but I can barely hear it over the hammering of my pulse, and I try to warn him but only manage a high whimper before clenching tight around his cock, gasping at the pleasure that goes through me like an electric shock again and again, over, as always, too damn quickly.

I take a long, selfish moment to savour the little trembles afterward, running my fingers through Mac's hair. He's resting his head on my shoulder, shivering through deep breaths, still hard inside me even after that.

"You good?" I ask him, my voice hoarse as if I've been shouting. 

Shit…I hope I wasn't shouting.

"Yeah, almost too good," he breathes, kissing my breast and flashing me a wry half-smile. "Almost."

He pulls out with a quiet, reluctant sigh I'm probably not meant to hear and starts to shift further down the bed, reaching for one of the blankets. His hand's already moving on his cock as he looks away, still not really comfortable getting himself off in front of me.

"C'mere," I tell him, tugging at his arm until he settles over me again, and cover his hand with my own.

"The dress…" he protests half-heartedly.

"It could use some dirtying up," I giggle and kiss him.

He needs no more encouragement, interlacing his fingers with mine and working his cock quickly, still fainting tasting of whiskey underneath both of us on his tongue, and suddenly there's a shockingly warm splash on my chest and neck.

"Jeez," he huffs, trying to catch his breath. "That wasn't on purpose."

I only giggle again, wriggling out of the dress and using it to mop at my breasts.

"You can come over any part of my body you want," I tell him, but he doesn’t look convinced, taking the dress and fussily wiping away every drop.

Jerking off over me must fall under the same "disrespectful" category as fucking me from behind, which I can only rarely convince him to do, out in the field when we really can't afford to expose more than the bare essentials for an enemy-territory quickie, and I'm too damn tired to argue with him on this. I'll just finish him off with my mouth in the future, another disrespectful act but one he loves too much to turn down, paying penance by kissing me afterward, sharing the taste, which I'll probably never tell him is almost painfully sexy.

I push the soiled dress out of his hands, over the side of the bed, and flop back to the creaking mattress with an exhausted grunt, wrapping my arms around him when he pulls the blankets up to my chest and rests his head on my shoulder. Laundry will definitely wait for morning, even if I probably won't be able to. He always wakes up early, and on mornings we're somewhere safe and private, makes it worth my while to open my eyes before the crack of dawn.

It's no fancy Fallon's dinner out, but it'll more than do.

"It was my birthday today," I tell him sleepily.

"No kidding?" he asks, lifting his head to catch my eyes. His hair's a beautiful fright, wild on one side, mashed down on the other. "You should've told me, we'd've done something. At least I would've bought some fancy lad cakes on the way home."

"Really?" I chuckle at the image of him driving into the old Red Rocket, desperately trying to pick out the least dead bunch of flowers for a nearly forgotten gift. "I wouldn't have thought birthdays would still be a thing out here."

"Growing up in a settlement of nothing but kids?" he asks, rolling his eyes. "Birthdays were huge. Remind me next year - we'll plan something."

His shoulders tighten up a little, then relax when I only reply, "Sounds like fun."

I roll on my side and he settles against me, suffocatingly close as always, arm tight around my stomach and face resting against my back, where I've now got a real conversation-starter of a scar.

"Love you," he says quietly, defiantly, and I feel his teeth against the tender skin of my healing shoulder, a face-splitting grin he tries to hide at my immediate, "Love you too."

It's instinctual, automatic, a conditioned response after eight years of marriage, the kiss at the door or the base airport.

But that doesn't mean it's not also true.


End file.
